![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() But as Nick Squires reported in the Telegraph a few years ago, a late 15th-century cannon dug up in Croatia “bears a striking resemblance to sketches drawn by the Renaissance inventor, notably in his Codex Atlanticus - the largest collection of his drawings and writing. Mounted on a wooden carriage and wheels, it would have allowed a much more rapid rate of fire than traditional single-barreled guns - in a precursor to modern day machine guns.” Many of Leonardo’s inventions, no matter how thoroughly he diagrammed their designs and mechanics in his notebooks, never got out of the realm of the theoretical in his lifetime - and some remain machines of the imagination. The website Leonardo da Vinci Inventions lists among the machines he came up with an armored car (“precursor to the modern tank”), an 86-foot crossbow, and a triple barrel cannon (at a time when even gunpowder itself hadn’t yet attained worldwide use). We less often think of him as an innovator of the tools of as destructive a practice as war, but a true polymath - and the life of Leonardo more or less defines that concept - knows no boundaries. We think of Leonardo da Vinci as one of the great humanists, a thinker and creator whose achievements spanned the realms of art, architecture, natural science, engineering, and letters. ![]()
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